Changes to the Facebook News Feed – What it Means for Users and Brands
Author: Katie
Facebook is redesigning it's news feed in an attempt to increase relevance and become a central web portal for users. Highlights:- Top Stories Feature: Facebook is developing an algorithm to display the most interesting posts from your friends, presumably based on previous "likes" and comments. You will still be able to access the full stream (as it is now) by clicking "recent stories."
- Several story types that were lost in the recent news feed update will come back including: friend acceptances, relationships, event RSVPs (good news for brands on that one) and group memberships.
- Speaking of Groups – they've gotten an overhaul as well. They'll begin to look a lot more like pages and activity that your friends do in groups that you're a part of will be displayed in your feed. Group admins still can't push updates to the whole group so if you need that kind of reach, a page is still your best bet.
- For pages: virtual gifts and friends who fan a page will also show up in the news feed
- Birthdays will move back up above the fold (which is nice for us forgetful types)
Major take away for brands: The right hand column will be less cluttered (giving the homepage ad a potentially larger impact) and they'll have more opportunities to get into the news feed stream with event RSVPs, virtual gifts, and new fans.
What's next? Facebook recently bought FriendFeed so there's hope that they'll be able to incorporate some of the things that FriendFeed did (and I guess, still does) do well that Facebook hasn't yet mastered. This includes things like sharing automatically imported items faster (from personal experience – blog posts take anywhere from 3-5 hours to show up) and more fine-tuned filtering system.
I'd think that the general user won't notice these changes too much which is good because it will cut back on those annoying "I hate the new layout and all forms of change" groups that take over your new feed for the first few weeks making it impossible to tell if you like it or not. For myself, I think these all represent steps in the right direction – at this point the only way Facebook can sustain continued growth is to give users better tools to organize the information overload that's happening there. The only thing I would suggest is more communication from Facebook. They know how to advertise brands using engagement ads – they need to do the same for their own network. Put out some video content on how to use the advanced filtering options (including lists and now the new top stories feed) so people can use it to their advantage and ultimately have a better experience on the network.
Posted via email from Katie Van Domelen’s Posterous
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